Breaking Barriers in Venture Capital with Samara Mejía Hernández

[MUSIC] >> Hello and welcome to the Exponential Growth Podcast, powered by Analysts Investors. I'm your host, David Olvencia, co-founder of Analysts Investors, an passionate advocate for leveraging innovation and technology to drive success. Let's get started. This is Exponential Growth. I also wanted to give gratitude to Salvi Media. They're the founding sponsor of the podcast. Their premier executive content agency dedicated to crafting exceptional content and strategies that elevate companies brands and their executives. They're creators of the Emmy Award winning CEO series. I think many of you have seen that. We've also featured one of my portfolio companies, Analysts Investors, and Hello on their CEO series. They've had in-depth interviews with CEOs talking about their personal journeys and business experience. The CEO series can be found on Cheddar, Entrepreneur Magazine, Reach TV, and really want to thank Salvi Media for their support of the podcast. You can also follow them on social media, as well as they have a podcast studio in Chicago, join them as well. Again, thank you, Salvi Media, for making this podcast possible. Today we have a very, very special guest. Somebody I've known probably seven-ish years or so from time of Chicago, both in the investing circles, a bit of the Latino circles, venture circles. It's an honor and a joy to welcome the GP and founder of Chingona Ventures Samara Mejia to the podcast. Welcome, Samara, how are you? I am good. It's Friday and just came back from a week of travel across both coasts, New York, San Francisco, and now back Chicago. It falls busy, but it's good. There's a lot going on. It's good. You're running a venture firm, an amazing venture. From, by the way, in full disclosure, I'm going on an LP in two of Samara's three funds. I guess the third one's still in the works right now. I'm proud LP. I should say a lot of LP and limited partners. I'm one of the 100s of investors in Samara's funds. A lot of time people throw acronyms out and you think everybody knows what the hell they mean. I had no idea, maybe 10 years ago, what the heck an LP meant, and I know that now. Samara, let me just say you're one of our biggest supporters. You're one of our biggest cheerleaders. You said yes early on for both funds. I just want to thank you for that because I think your first and foremost of a friend, a friend of mine, a friend of the firms, our biggest cheerleader and a really great LP. So thank you for all your support. Thank you, Nub. That's great. Look, and I think, I mean, the funds are doing, they're doing great, but I think for LP's, I think too, you, at being limited partners, it's an interesting mix, right? I mean, I'm with you. I'm in five-ish funds or something like that. And, you know, it's also a network, but it's also a way that you help these portfolio companies, like I have invested interest to cheer you on, and the cheer on your portfolio companies. I mean, I do it because we're friends and I join it all this up, but I also have invested interest to do that, because I think it also helps them and helps them grow, and helps your firm growing the resources to help them grow, right? Yeah, and we've co-invested together, both you as an angel and you through on him. So it's a great community also that you've built as well. And, you know, people ask what's the great LP? It's obviously someone that gives you capital early on. Someone that cheers you on, and someone that can co-invest with you if that's their thesis. So, yeah, so I love what you've built with on Hinnis in the community, and so I think there's so much more to build on that. But yeah, we're also great co-investors as well. Great. Well, actually, well, some out of our listeners out there, may or may not know you, and you have an insight view to your story. Now, I'm sure there's probably things I don't know about the story, but share with our listeners there your story, Samara. Yeah, so my story is started. Well, I was from Mexico. I came to the US at a young age. I grew up in Chicago, and I was picked up math early on. I love math. I love numbers. And that's what led me to study engineering at the University of Michigan. So I'm an engineer by training. I love math and science, and I started my career on Wall Street. So I had a first internship there early on, and then I started full-time during the beginning of the last financial crisis, which was an interesting time to be on Wall Street. I gave my engineering mindset and my technical skills. I had a switch to a sales mindset, and a mindset around. People think sales is kind of like a used car salesman, or pitching and talking a lot, and it's really solving a problem for somebody. It's listening to your customers, understanding their needs, and positioning a product based on those needs. And especially during times when there's a financial crisis, when the world is blowing up, the market is in performing, the product is not performing, and your customers look to you for advice on what they should do. And so there's a lot of learnings around that, around building trust and relationship with your customers, and I still talk to some of those customers. We're still friends, and it was a good time to see. I was at the end of Wall Street, learned a lot about finance, but then also learned beyond that very quickly on trust that you build with your customers. And so I was there in the beginning part of my career, and then I went to Business School here in Chicago, and that's where I got exposed to venture capital and early-stage investing. I fell in love. I was in an internship with an early-stage group here, and I fell in love with it. I was like, "What is this? You have no numbers, no revenue, barely a product, an idea on a team, and you have to figure out how to invest." And you get to be a tiny piece of that in a founder's life, and you also. They're building products that aren't. But maybe there may or may not be a market for it. They're building a product that sometimes hasn't been even developed for, and you have to figure out if this is a winning product, a winning team, the right market. So I fell in love with it, and I found two founders here in Chicago that had just started their farm. I joined them as a third person on the team. I helped build the firm from the ground up, did everything from sourcing to creating the ways of doing to diligence to work with our CFO through audits, and so that was a great groundwork for me to learn what it is to build from the ground up. And then I was fortunate, I was there for five years across to the fund, and I was fortunate to be able to then start my own venture firm. Not ever thinking that I would when I got into venture, but I saw an opportunity to go in earlier, especially in ecosystems that didn't have metrangel networks, or Chicago being one of them, but many outside of the valley, to go in industries that were growing, but BC was low to fund, and three goals with founders that fit the traditional mold, in terms of founder background experience and geography. So we found that you can one of ventures in April of 2019. We made 27 investments across Fintech, Future of Work, Future of Learning and Health Tech, and then we launched you know, an event for fun too, in May of 2022. And it was a 53 million dollar fund. We've now made 27 investments, or about to do 28 investments in the fund, and we're at the end. And then, so yeah, we're coming on fund three. So it's been a journey, and there's been so much in the last 10 years that I've been in venture capital. And they always say, the longer you're in venture capital, the more humble you get, and that's true now more than ever. And I know you've been in this space for a while. So it's been a fun time to be in it, and I'm just fortunate to do what I do every single day. So when did you first hear about like, I mean, so you're in Wall Street, you know, you get an engineering degree from Michigan, great, great school, phenomenal school, by you know, Chicago, Michigan, getting to a great school, and then you get, you know, to Wall Street. Did you, were you familiar, how was your feeling of familiarity with venture when you were at Wall Street? I'm a scale of one to two. There are. Zero, yeah, I said. I mean, is that cool? Yeah. We stole, we stole some private equity products, but, and we know we talked about the J curve and all that, but it was very little. I mean, there was certainly not many venture capital, these sort of alternative products that you put, you know, less than 10% of your portfolio, their high risk, high return. So we were talking more about core equity and fixing come products, some non-correlated asset classes, very little alternatives. So not a lot. Interesting. Yeah, no, but it's so basically kind of you get your, would have, before I say, when you got your MBAs, when it was kind of like, oh, this is interesting, you're getting a little, is that where you started hearing more about it, or when did you get more? Yeah, but, you know, so I graduated, and when I graduated, I didn't know anybody in a room for venture capital. I don't know if anybody in my class got a job in BC right after business school. People that were going into finance were going into private equity, they were going to invest in banking, they were going to maybe some hedge funds, but Chicago was still growing, it was still small. I mean, Chicago was growing a ton in venture capital, but there was very few funds at the time, and jobs weren't posted, right? It was, I mean, jobs, more jobs are posted now, but very few jobs. You had to find somebody that knew somebody in venture capital. And so I was so naive because I just thought, great, this is a great place to go into. I'm going to go find the job. And I actually went to 1871 here in Chicago, which was this startup ecosystem, and Northwestern had a room there, but you could go as a student. And so I would go there, and I would literally, this is where my sales course came in, because I'm a natural introvert. I'm really shy growing up, like I, you know, don't do this, but I would go up to different startups and ask them if they needed help with anything, if they need help with putting a pitch deck together, or doing a financial model, or, you know, doing customer discovery calls, I help one put together a deck for their Series A raise, and, but, you know, it was what I could find. And then I remember a VC here, he saw me working on this, me and my friend, and he's like, what are you guys doing? He just like approached this career like hustle, and you're trying to figure it out. And we were telling him what we were doing. He was like, well, I have a project for you. So, those my first project with a venture firm out here, and I put something together for, I think it was for a potential LP, because they were trying to pitch a corporate on how to be a part of their innovation team, and what that could look like if they made an investment. But yeah, no, it was, it was a grind. And I didn't know how hard it was to get into venture capital. I didn't know the percentages of people going to venture capital, the backgrounds that you needed. So, a lot were, you know, former operators of unicorns. They were, you know, typical Silicon Valley, stand for, like, and I didn't have any of that. I didn't have the network of knowing somebody. Some venture firms start with, you know, some family money, and they know a lot of them are now with individuals and family offices. I didn't know that wasn't anybody in my network. Your family wasn't able to help, you know, boost rapidly with about 20 million or so? No, yeah, I mean, and some people literally have their families put in a million other check, and you know, they start making investments. So, no, then that's very few of us, right? And so, I think it was early on in my career, I would say it was good to be naive, because even engineering. So, I did not know how hard it was to get into Michigan engineering. I didn't know, it was the number two program in the country at the time for what I went to, but I love the football stadium. And so, I just applied and I got in. So, it's like, we're going to go see some very football games. -Beyhouse, the big house. -Right. Oh, yeah, exactly. Yeah, and so, I, you know, I didn't know how hard it was to get into Goldman Sachs. I remember I was an engineering conference, and they were there. And I went up to the person, because a friend of mine was with nearby. And I just said, "What do you guys do?" I had no idea. And, you know, there's a whole line. And I just was like, just curious. And then they're like, "Well, you should apply." I was like, "Okay, you know, I had no idea." And then my business school friends were like, "Oh, my gosh, you got an interview with Goldman Sachs." You know, that's like the Gucci of Invest and Banking. And I just had no idea. And so, I think early on in my career, I just did think that I thought we're interesting. I was just really curious, not knowing how hard it was to get in. And I think that benefited me because that's why I went for it, because I didn't know that it was nearly impossible. I'm more intentional later on in my career, obviously. But, yeah, I think, and that's what I tell a lot of younger people. Just, you know, explore and be curious and go for things. That even roles that you don't think you qualify for, I think early on, I, you know, I would always look to see if I had 10 out of the 10 things. And my boyfriend at the time that my husband was like, "No, you can learn the rest of the five things. It's just applied for you. You have the potential to learn." And so, even now when I hire, I look for things. When I put the job application, I always say, even if you don't have all these things, still apply. And I always look for potential. So, what does somebody have? And what are the things that they can learn? And I realized, so, interesting, I have an analyst at my team that came from the same sales desk, because I did it at Goldman. And most people, you know, hire very technical people, product people. And she had started small business in high school. And she had done small, plural things. But she had this skills skill, and I hired her. And she is just a aggressive, withsourcing. She is hungry for real. She was rich out to people that were like, "Early PM, a bumble, like early whatever." And they'll respond to her. Right? And so, that's one of the skills that you don't necessarily think. But it's so important in sales, right? And VC, to get founders to take your calls, to get them to, you know, obviously, to get investment from you, to pitch to LPs like yourself. Pitch to LPs, I was saying, "Fundries." Oh my god. Oh, you know it. You experience it. It's a whole thing, especially when you don't have a track record. When you're new to a fund with a new, you know, GP, it's like you're starting all over again. And so you have to pitch on it, idea, and the belief that you're going to be successful at this. So, yeah, I'm a big fan of these non-traditional people, non-traditional, higher, non-traditional founders, to see potential, to see opportunity. Because the obvious ones are, everybody's going after. The obvious ones are like, "Okay, this is what's worked in the past." What I love to see is finding these unique opportunities that are not obvious yet and taking a bet. And obviously, there is a risk to that, but that's where the fun part comes. That's where the alpha comes in. So, yeah, so I do that in all aspects of my life. Cool. Oh, really cool. So, this exponential growth podcast, we like to educate the audience on trends, exponential trends that are out there. Many infused by technology, but not necessarily. You have an interesting viewpoint into trends that are going out there, technical and not. But you have the engineering math background that gives you a little bit more view in there. You have, I think you mentioned almost 50 or so across your funds. Startups, you've invested probably another hundreds if not thousands that you've seen. What can you share with our audience from your viewpoint? What are the top two or three trends that they should be aware of dig into, understand deeply? So, I think, so, let me take a step back and speak to early stage startups, particularly venture capital, because that's my world. The traditional way of doing venture capital has completely flipped on its head. So, what I learned 10 years ago when I got into this has completely changed from everything from what a venture firm is to what a growth in a startup needs to what is going to have, what businesses you avoid and what businesses you focus on. And let me dive in a little bit deeper. So, the first thing is what is a venture capital firm, what it means to be a venture capital firm? This has completely changed. So, now venture firms are becoming asset management firms. The biggest players are taking a lot of the money from the LPs and they are not only investing in high growth startups. They're starting to have a PE-like model. They're trying to become an RIA or registered investment advisor. Right there? It's just becoming a very different thing. And what's driving that is one money in the ecosystem. But two is what exits have looked like. Right? Exits have changed. You used to buy and hold and wait to IPO. And that model has changed. It's taking longer to go public. It's companies that are being successful. Don't necessarily want to go public. Because there's all the reporting requirements, all the rules required with that. They want to stay longer public, private longer. And so, you're trying to figure out how are you going to get returns in a very different way. And is it becoming a PE-like shop? Is it selling to the secondary market in a different way? Is it building a big enough firm where you support them from idea to exit? I mean, there's so many different models people are investing in sports teams now that are venture capital firms. Right? And so, it's just become very different. So, a lot of emerging managers, a lot of fund managers are trying to figure out, where do I place myself? What worries in this new ecosystem that's evolving that I need to place myself? So, that's one piece of it. The second piece is a type of businesses that you have historically invested in. So, there's this really interesting thing. And I love that's why I have two younger investment professionals that people are like, "Oh, they're younger. You know, you need someone senior." And they are looking at things from fresh eyes, which I love, right? They're looking at new trends. They're experiencing it. They're the forefront of it. And they're also like, "Well, why aren't we investing in this type of business?" And then my head, I'm like, "Well, and we have never had. They have low exit multiples, right?" But these new technology tools have completely changed again, particularly AI, right? So, for instance, one example is traditional services businesses. Traditional services business are those that have great cash flow early on. They had their tech enabled in some cases, but they're basically putting up a website and then, that's their tech. But really, it's used to be lower margin businesses. They used to get acquired for one to two X-probably multiple. And those weren't necessarily considered high growth or big venture outcomes. AI has completely flipped it on its head. And there was one article, or what it's called, but it was, they talked about the revenge of the services businesses, where now they can get SaaS-like margins or much higher margins, because they're able to be more capital efficient because they're able to use AI tools. And all of a sudden, they can get venture-like outcomes, or they can get rapid exponential growth. They can be very capital-efficient. And they don't necessarily need to raise a lot of venture money, because they have these businesses, their services, they can ramp up to, certainly from zero to a million very quickly. And now, you're able, you have to look at them in a very different way. And we have looked at some of these businesses, and I'm like, "Whoa, this is completely changing the game." But I attribute that to my younger team, I'm looking at those from a fresh perspective, right, and assessing those deals. So that's the second piece of it. And on the third piece of it, it's just the way you think about growing a business is very different. So going from zero to 10 million in revenue, it took years. And now, people are doing that in a month. Right. And it's so much real, and I don't know if they're real, but some, you know, you don't see the one to two years that they were building on the back end, and you know, they talk about zero to 10 in a few months. But still, I mean, it's rapid. And there's not one board meeting, I'm not a part of where they're talking about how do we become more productive? How do we test this out without hiring somebody? And you can do that with, yeah, there's limitations. There's certainly limitations of what I can do. And we're experiencing it firsthand as we implement it into our organization. But it, how quickly these models are learning, right? Right now, maybe they're 30 to 40% accurate, or whatever it is, and you have to type in, you know, follow-on questions to get the right answer. But I heard this, this staff from a GP building AI first company. She believes this is land from Basin Fed. I was talking, I was listening to her recently at an event. She would say that within less than a year, they're going to be 70 to 80% accurate, right? Which is a crazy number. But they're getting faster and more accurate, so much quicker, and there's so many tools being developed so quickly to help businesses become more efficient. Many of, we've invested in, that it's just changing the game as to how much you raise, what you can do with what you raise. Do you really need to hire people to do this? Can you become more efficient? Even just testing things out. And so, for instance, one of our companies in our portfolio is called optimal.AI. They are helping review people's code and helping them make sure it's compliant. See if there's any errors. And they're doing it better than some of the bigger tools out there right now. And one of their customer feedback was like, basically, you're able to hire a software engineer for $20 a month, right? It's what they're, how they're doing these software businesses. So, so that for us is like, okay, how do we think about how much capital they're going to need to raise? How do we think about, you know, maybe they only need to raise for a million and they get to 15 million revenue. Who knows, right? Which is, you know, better for all of us, right? Just great. A better for all of us, right? No, no credit. There's a lot of competition in the market and then, you know, raising is better for them to raise. So they can go faster than raise so they can figure out product market. So, so for that, that's changing the game on its head, which which we're excited about. And so, so those I would say are kind of the big three things that we're seeing in terms of changes. Certainly within the last year, year two that have been very different and very rapid in the last 10 years in venture capital. Yeah, you know, there's a couple of ones I wanted to just pull out there. You know, the time to start in scale. You think about, I was in I was in Bulwetalk, Columbia at their tech week and I was talking on some panel and that was just like, you know, if you look at Ford Motor Company, it took them whatever, 40, 50 years to get like, who a billion dollars in value, you know, Google's whatever, you know, 15, 20 years, right? But the time, whether it's to create revenue or or or or get who a billion dollars in value, just keeps getting smaller and smaller and smaller. And it always will, right? That's just going to always get to where, you know, what what what what what what what is it? Where does it kind of hit infinity or whatever? You know, it's like an idea, capital resources, product all coming together at once, right? And hitting the market and growing and scaling. And so that's where you know, that's with with all these tools one way we're going. And then to your point, it was like also team size. I mean, you think about Ford, where to get to a billion of values. I don't know what 100,000 employees 200,000 employees, you know, you know, now you're doing it with, you know, one, two, three, four, you can you're going to be able to do these with, you know, human, you know, one, two to three humans. And so hot, you know, as as an investor and these are the things that all the changes and the the modeling and the things that we have to do of these trends that are just continue to happen and continue to that will happen. I'll tell you and you know, with that there was one of our percolate companies called agency of the Astoris, who is one of the very few Latino unicorns. His last company, he started drift with one of the, I got acquired for over a billion dollars. And he's a friend, LP in the fund, and also for a folio company. And he, you know, he said a lot on LinkedIn, but one of the things he had mentioned was that it used to be a thing you brag about about how many employees you hired, how much you raised. And now it's completely opposite. Like how much did you raise versus how much revenue you have and how few employees you've been able to do, build a product with. And he goes, I never want to have a company that's bigger than 100 employees. And I don't think I need to. And so it's really interesting. That's another thing. It's like now you're looking at revenue per employee, how much employees you have versus how much revenue the company has. So there's a lot of really crazy and interesting things. And one thing I'll say with that is that we're all going, everything's changing so rapidly and we're all going so fast. But there's some things that we're starting to find holds in. And I think we're going to start experiencing that more. I think we're still in the early stages. I mean, no one knows where we're at, but we're definitely still in the early stages of figure out what is a good AI company, what is true AI, what are people I've just going to buy. Because we're in the stage right now where there's some companies getting some early traction why? Because a lot of enterprises have these bigger budgets to spend on these AI tools. So everyone's trying different things. And so one year you can get a pilot. And the next year you don't know if it's going to convert to a contract or not. There might be a brand new company that's doing it better than you. Or they've decided that they're trying 10 different things and you're just going to focus on two things. So that is not guaranteed of that recurring revenue. Into the recurring revenue piece, right? Like SaaS margins used to be at 80%, 90%. And now it might be close to 40% because of the AI costs associated with it. So that also, we're taking a look at and get the way we used to look at this since 10 years. It's just changed so much in the last two years. And so we're constantly assessing that. Other things, even internally, we've made a point to supercharge operations, but AI made a point to reduce how long it takes to do all the tasks. We literally have all the tasks written down how long it takes to reduce that by 50%. And as we're doing it, trying all these different things, there's tools and we're slowing down. Well, me, me, he has the old person on the team is like, I feel like I'm just so like, wait a minute, let's slow down. I'm testing Chad GPT, but doing it with creating an AI policy, creating AI guidelines, making sure your cybersecurity is in place. I'm actually looking at a lot of cybersecurity companies right now. We just did an investment two weeks ago in it. And the amount of things that CSOs are trying to understand that's happening so quickly, every employee is using AI, whether it's a loud or not a loud or they don't know, they're testing it out in every single industry. And so how do you, as a CSO, of a company, make sure that that's done in a compliant way, that data that's not supposed to be shared or shared? And even if you have the enterprise version and it says, we're not going to share this with OpenEI, AI, how do you guarantee that it's not actually being shared? So all these security issues around that, that you have no idea. And so with all this crazy movement go fast, I'm also looking at companies and if they're also figuring out, okay, what holds this is open in organization? What going so fast, what's going to be wrong with this? And how do we ensure that it's done in a way that's secure that where our data is and being shared? And so that's another opportunity the market are seeing. Yeah, you know, the funny thing is, you know, you give your email or your phone number out to something like, no, yeah, no one's guaranteed. We got it all secure and like every time you open the newspaper and like, oh, no, this point, they've been breached, they've been breached, they've been breached. They're just, I don't like, I don't, you know, I don't buy that. And then to your, you know, the point on all the changes happening, right? This is kind of why I believe in this, this exponential growth podcast because, you know, how do you, there's so much happening so fast, how do you keep up? And I think the one way you keep up is you listen to great leaders who are kind of in it, and you're getting different perspectives from this vantage point. I have somebody to talk about energy and all the stuff that's going on with energy, right? That, and there's all these different areas and it's, you know, amazing, amazing way to do it. And by the way, too, selfishly, I'm learning a lot too, right? So it is also good for me as well. So, Samada, we also, just one other thing with that is I was just on a panel with Brad Bell yesterday. So I'm a part of Venture Forward. It's part of NECA. We're doing a lot in the Venture Capital community on mentoring young venture capitalists, on mentoring emerging managers. So they've been doing just a lot in Brad Bell. It was one of the early donors to this, to this organization. And we were doing a five year anniversary event. I was monitoring a panel with him and I asked somebody, I could obviously no panel, you know, is a panel. A panel that's why they got exactly. And so I asked him about it because he, you know, he started his career in the 80s and now he's trying to figure out, like, what does he think about it? I, right? This is, and he talked about the early 2000s about how, you know, software was there and people were worried about it and I thought it was like a trend and just whatever. And so, so he's gone through a few different cycles of this. But one of the things he said was around any new tool is trying it and is playing around with it and doing it. So everybody, I think there's a lot of people using it, but certainly not every single person. And we look at businesses that are selling into small businesses like small law firms and small car washes and, right, that are like, how do I even do this? How do I even try? What is this? And so he said, it's just playing around with it and testing it out. Obviously, for me, as a business owner, is how do we do it in a compliant way? How do we make sure we're doing, we're going fast, but we're, we're slowing down to make sure that we're seeing where all the data is going. And we're making sure that it's right because right now you put something in Jeffy, chat to me, tea like an investment memo or one page or in your read, it's like, some of it doesn't make any sense whatsoever. And you're like, what did this information come in? And he even said, he, he, he, he said, he loves, you know, pushing back on chat, you be tea and saying, like, actually, I think you're wrong. And then, and, no, I know, I've done that too. I've done that too. How do you get this data? This doesn't make sense. Oh, that's, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, yeah, we like, oh, yeah, I'm sorry, you're right. It's like with a little bit about personality too, which is kind of crazy. They're not trained. They're not trained to push back, you know, I, and, and they don't know that you're playing around and, and, and, you know, question them on purpose. But there's a lot of limitations to it. And so, be able to make sure you get something and not assume that it's correct and checking to see where the sources come from, checking links. And so that's where it is right now. It's going to be very different in the year. But, um, anyways, I wanted to mention that because I, because he said, one of the things to do is start testing it out, start trying it, start seeing what are the limitations of it, start questioning where the data comes from, and, you know, be able to everything incorporated, but, but start using it, um, even in a, in a small way. So I think that's really important because a lot of businesses are also like, we're going to be left behind if we don't use it. And everybody's trying it out. And we'll see where we get to in the next few years. But it's just completely changed the game on what you're able to do from the productivity perspective at work. Oh yeah, and more and more to come and more to come. So that kind of helps us segue some out into, you know, so there's these trends. And maybe your investment, right? You know, you invest in a high risk, high return asset class. There's many asset class, right? Real estate stocks, bonds, cash, you know, bonds, you know, bonds cash, pretty boring stuff. But so, you know, to our listeners out there, just with the context of the trends that are going that you as a venture capitalist, how do you, or give them some thoughts tips, maybe not tips to get in trouble with the tip, but just perspectives on investing and things that they should think about as they build their portfolios, as they invest, based on all the experience you have. Yeah, and it's particularly if it's an individual, it's an individual, it's right because you can invest in whatever you want to invest. And I say that because as a fund manager, I am investing based on a thesis that I pitched to my investors. And I can't really go outside of that thesis, right? I mean, yes, they're paying me to see the early risks or trends in the market and make adjustments, but I can't go from being a Fintech fund to a crypto fund, right? Or pure crypto fund or going from a climate fund to only investing in healthcare technology. So, but as an angel investor, you can do whatever you want. And the first day I would do is just to start because so many people don't understand it, who think it's a high risk, as a class, you can do that in so many different ways. You can do it through angel groups, you can do it through platforms where you can invest even a hundred dollars, right? And so there's so many different ways you can do it now. And understanding that it's a high risk. And it's not your gambling, but be 100% okay with losing the money that you invest because it is high risk. But I would say start with things that you first of all understand and are really curious about and can are really excited about because you will just naturally be drawn to it. You will just naturally ask a lot of questions. The way I think about as a venture investor in a very high risk as a class is fully understanding what are my risks today and how do I mitigate those risks. Now, you're not going to be able to 100% get rid of all the risks, but understanding what those are and are you comfortable with those? Or can you mitigate that by helping the company or can you mitigate it by saying, all right, this is the risk, but we have a lead from the team to be able to pivot because at the stage I invest in, it is so early, everything that they present to me, I know it's going to change in 12 months. They send me their financial miles, but I know that this is going to be wrong. This is wrong. That's the one thing I know for sure. But it helps me understand. This is a beautiful financial. Let me tell you the one thing I know for sure can go be wrong. Exactly, right? Of course to be wrong. However, it helps me understand how you're thinking about the business and helps me understand how you're thinking about how you're going to get your miles so in some detail, how many customers it takes, what contract value you're thinking about for your customers, how that can expand all of the things. I have a full framework. I do full-do diligence and people are like, what do you do to diligence on? It's pre-seed, right? We have a full framework that we use on experts that we speak to on customers, potential customers. We've done reference calls on former college coaches even, right? We try to understand the full spectrum of the person, first and foremost because a lot of times early on, it is the team that you're investing in. Oh, yeah. But also, and I always saw my team when I first started. There's so many ways you can say no to a company. It's figuring out what is the yes, what is the excitement and opportunity. For me, the less you have, the more it's about the team and the opportunity, but the more actually this counterintuitive, the more detail I'd like to say because it's helping me understand that you have a plan in place, that you have a roadmap knowing that it's going to change, but it's how they can communicate this. And the best ones are the ones where you come out of the meeting are like, well, like you learn something brand new about a space that you had never thought before. Even if you've done a ton of investment in called FinTech, I've done a lot of investment in FinTech, and they have just this view of the world that is crazy, but they have early traction that they're early in on this trend and this change. And so for me, I, the advice I would give early on is just like, okay, if you're an angel investor, be an individual, you can first of all do it yourself, or you can do it through platforms like on-hiddes or through other angel groups that have people that have done this for a while. They have co-investors like Chingona that do a lot of the due diligence that can come in and educate people on the market and understand obviously the risks, but go into space that you're really excited about because tagging to these founders is so, for me, so exciting, right? They have this whole viewpoint of the world that is so different. They're the first to market. They're getting early insights. And there's, for us, what were very values aligned between us and other companies that also are thinking about changing the world in a very different way. But there's these huge problems that need to be solved. And these corporations aren't going to move fast enough and it's these individuals that have this unique mindset, this unique perspective that have the risk tolerance that the capital to go off and attack it and solve these problems in a way that it's never been done before. And then you as an investor gets to be a small part of that and that's really exciting. Yeah, you know, and it's also such a privilege because you're getting to see a lot of startups who are really solving big problems or coming with the passion and the innovation. That's a lot of different things. And you're like, this is amazing. So you think about the repetitions that we get and it kind of starts also shape your view on what the future is, right? Because these startups are trying to break in and grow and scale something that's going to be very big in the next whatever, five, ten years. In order to do that, they got to use tech. They got to come forth. They got to come with speed. And it is such a privilege. You know, to see all those two and then also your invest in a select few, right? Because I think what you'll look at a thousand deals or so. And for every thousand deals that you hit in your funnel, some out of how many are you investing in? Ish. Less than one percent. So we look at over a thousand deals a year that just go through the like in our system way more than that that come that come to us. But yeah, we're investing in about 10 for year, maybe plus or more. So it's a lot and that's another thing is that these founders are getting told no constantly every single day. And they have to believe enough. They have to have both confidence and humility, confidence in like when a lot of people are telling them no and that it's not going to work, but they will do it. But then also humility where it's like, well, if you, there's a point where like you know, okay, this is actually not going to work, right? And so we have to pivot to something else. So it's been a couple of minutes. Too many, a little bit too many knows that maybe it's something. There might be something there, which maybe your story or right, but like the best thing is it founders. And you hear all these stories that are like, oh, you know, founder raised 50 million, 100 million on a second idea. But you don't realize that they have a network. They have build businesses before they're an expert in this space, right? So you don't hear that. But if you're a founder, doesn't have a network, was never built a company before raising money is going to be even harder. And how you do it is you actually have to have more proof points because you're not going to, unless you know people, you're not going to raise up on a second idea. And if you didn't go to like Ivy League and have a network. So you have a lot of those founders are ones where they get early traction. They have very little resources, very little capital, but they build something and they start testing it out on nights and weekends. They have early users. They have an MVP. They have pilots. And so then it's like, do you raise venture money? Because venture capital money is very different all of a sudden. And you have investors. You have to answer to you. You may have a board. You have to grow very differently. You know, even though it's a company with a founder that started a company before, but it wasn't venture back. And then when I invested, I was, he got really excited. I wanted to be a choir for 100 million. I was like, oh no, we got to go much bigger and much faster. It's a very different ball game because our expected returns are very different because you as an LP can invest in the stock market, right? And get a different level of return with a lot more risk. So we have to grow very quickly in a very good risk return profile. It's a lot of risk. But that means that the return has to be ginormous. So yeah, so there's a lot to these founders. They can tell no all the time, but having that right balance and venture capital taking venture capital money is also different. We'll different ball game. Yeah. And so you know, it's like you got this all these different assets you can invest in, right? We spent a lot of time here talking about the venture and the angel space and the starter space, high risk, high risk, high return. But some of those two also, the learnings and as you build and struct portfolios, right? You have some equities. And so a lot of these lessons, you know, apply across, right? I mean, even if you're investing in a public stock, right? You're looking at risk. You're looking at the future, you're looking at the trends, liquidity to your point, thinking about it that way too, right? I mean, how, you know, with this vent with this asset class that this, you know, call it venture angel, right? The liquidity, I don't know, roughly eight, 10 years, ish, you know, which you which you which to your point, you got to be investing in companies that are, you know, well beyond 100 million, a billion, you know, they have paths to get there. So you can get these investors returned because why would I invest in getting 20, you know, 20% when I can invest in, I don't know, you know, public stocks or whatever. Microsoft, Google, Oracle that just went up 60% in a day. I don't know what 30, 40% in a day. Right? So it's, that's another thing. Yeah, that's another thing with early state investors is understanding the risk, understanding that you are going to invest in this company. It's going to be a long time cycle, right? It's not going to be one, two years, it's going to be sometimes 10 years, 15 years there. And that's one thing that actually has started to change in the ecosystem. So one of my, one of my LPs who is a founder, a GP, one of my limited partners, that's a general partner of a fund in the early 2000s. He is one of the best performing funds. And I asked him, what's the playbook, right? Or how did you make your first unicorn? How did you make your first fund? And he said it was in, he said it was in year, what was it? A year, 14 or 15 of his fund. And you know, funds like your 10, yeah, fun, his fund won. And it was the, that company was in the bottom five of his portfolio. I think he had like 20 companies for the first 10 years. And he didn't return the fund plus more until your 15. And that's how long it took to get your money back, but a lot of money. Now I will say that that's changed from LPs perspective. A lot of investors want their money back sooner. And their GP's investors have been trying to build creative ways to get the money back sooner. And I don't know what sort of impact that's going to have because there's two trains of thought. So one train I thought from investors, general partners is, okay, if the companies in my portfolio that I want to send, the companies in my portfolio that I want to sell aren't doing well. The companies that I don't want to sell, everybody wants to buy, right? And so the companies that are not doing well, nobody wants to buy the companies and they want to buy the discount. The companies that are doing well, I don't want to sell. And there's a fine hold mentality and still that GP that I mentioned that was very successful. He still talks about that. He's like, if I have a high performing company, I am going to buy and hold to extract the most amount of I IPO plus. And there's some, my friends would say, no, I'm going to exit the company at Series B. I'm an exit the company when they get when they get valid a three hundred million. I'm going to, or I'm going to exit part of it. And a lot of LPs are demanding that right now. And so there's this whole conversation in the ecosystem of what is the right exit price, what's the right exit time. And LPs have very different perspectives. I actually was doing on a call with an LP and they asked me how I thought about rich, because I'm in year four or five of the fund and how I'm thinking about exit. And I'm like, wow, there's literally some companies I just invest in the last 12 months. I don't pre-seed, meaning that like they just launched their product and they're asking me this question. And it wasn't unique to them. They had two or three other LPs asked me this. It was like, this is really interesting. Like, if I respond, like, are they trying to trick me? Like, if I respond and say, like, no, I'm going to get, I'm going to sell my position now. Is that a bad thing? Is that a good thing? Right. And I have my own framework. I want that. And I answer the question based on what we believe is right. And the return to that. We have a certain philosophy around that right now. But yeah, no, it's, it's back to the earlier point we had, like the venture capital ecosystem has changed so much. Everyone's trying to kind of figure out, and everyone has their own debate on what that shall look like. Well, Samada, it's been great. I know you got a lot of things going on. Very busy. We were honored that you were able to take the time with us and share your perspectives on exponential growth across some of the trends, investments, your leadership thoughts, growing your team, driving operational efficiency. How do our listeners out there stay connected with you across social media platforms? Yeah, absolutely. So first of all, any business that has an opportunity for us to invest in go to, to, to, sorry, WW, WDAT, to go to that ventures and go to the, the submit button. We literally look at every single deal that comes to the door. It will give you a description of exactly what we invest in. And I actually have invested in companies that came from Colton Bound 2 in the last year. One of them was a founder that heard me on Bloomberg. And I said the same thing. They applied and then within a year we invested in oversupply Brown. So it does work. So please submit your business there. And we're on LinkedIn, to go on adventures there. We're on other social media platforms. But reach out, follow us. We have our newsletter that just came out. You can see what we're doing in our portfolio, events that were asked. You can connect with us. So we'd love to hear from you. And David, thank you so much for, for all that you do for the ecosystem. And if you're, you follow us on LinkedIn. You'll see David always like our posts and comments because he's our biggest cheerleader. Proud, proud cheerleader. Proud, Chingone. Oh, Chingone. Health and health and Chingone, adventures. No, Samara again. Thank you so much for those out there. Follow follow them. Stay tuned. I mean, they're just warming up. A lot of great things in becoming from Chingone, Avengers. So stay stay tuned to Samara and her amazing team at Chingone Avengers. Thank you, Samara. Have an excellent weekend. Thank you. [BLANK_AUDIO]