dakota mckenzie / dynamic fund

You'll hear everybody say you need to get to a million in revenues quickly as possible. It happens all the time. Now like, well, cursor got to 200 million in 18 months. What are we doing for our AI company if we haven't even got to a million in revenue yet? Why aren't you like cursor? That spectrum's so wide. What's actually more objective than that scenario is, okay, if we need to get to the first milestone, do we even have the right products? What we really try to figure out is based on your discovery in the pipeline, sales, vacuum and the side, do people actually want what you are looking for, and why is this product different? Then you can start building that repeatable process. And I think those types of things help companies respect us in all of our businesses' referral lists through founders and 70% founders by 30% board members at this point. I think that's one bigger part of it, the endorsement. But the other thing is, even when I get introduced, typically it's like, the founder doesn't know how to enterprise sales, and then we realize the actual issues, the pricing model, first, people love this product. And the founders actually very good at selling. Let me actually explain what they need to work on. And then that puts the company at hyper growth at a certain point. I think just that type of lens is earned because of all the work that I've done at the board level and founder level with many different companies. It requires a little bit more from the authoritative stance that if you are at a venture firm and you're reporting to a stack of people that's very different than me and independent person running this as I am. And some days that's the most rewarding thing and some days it's terrifying as every founder can attest to. I think that's what makes us truly unique. Dakota, welcome to the slidespot where we uncover the stories of fresh emerging managers across the early stage venture landscape. You are the founder and general partner of a dynamic growth partners, an early stage fund investing in the best technical founders. Looking to accelerate growth from precede onwards. We'll get into what that means in a second in the meantime. Let's begin where we always do, which is by asking how do we get to this point? Was it always the plan for you to build your own fund? I feel very lucky that I'm actually saying that I'm starting a fund, but I would say directionally I wanted to do something like this, but it wasn't always the plan to formally be an investor maybe to start from the beginning kind of like how I created this weird obsession and I've gotten here. When I first got into college, first person in my family, I'd ever go to college, it's very exciting. And I really just aspired to be an executive or have a seat at the table not really knowing what it meant. As I was more inspired by tech and learning about the Boston startup community, I really just wanted to plug myself in and in order to afford college, I needed to find jobs. So I've started working at startups, building lead lists, trying to work with founders, learning how all this stuff works and being very obsessed with it and inspired by working with different people, working with someone like top man, where watching all of these things scale. I wanted to keep working at startups rather than going into banking and consulting like my peers. I had the opportunity to move to the Bay Area and I was like, there's only one way to make this work and just continue to go work with great companies. The more and more I learned about all of the things you can do with different startups, I just wanted to build and work alongside founders. And then not really knowing that the venture capital industry would take somebody like me, had the opportunity to work in unusual ventures, to work with a lot of amazing founders there, eventually inspired the opportunity to build dynamic growth partners. And as I got closer to the board level and working with amazing companies, I got here and started investing in companies. It's kind of an interesting path and more common these days, where you're own sort of founder in a way created a couple of cross-marketing agencies and worked closely alongside the early stage. What was the moment in time that it really clicked? Yet another project that you were working on, you're like, damn it, I need to want to quit this thing. I didn't transition from getting your hands dirty to any of the portfolio. Good question. I think there was two things. Once I wrote my first check into a business, I was like, wow, there's a nice rush to that. It's a little different than closing a deal, but similar in some ways. But really like the thing I started to notice and I'm very proud of and I'm hoping we can translate this on the investing side more often. Many startups don't make it. As I work with many different companies over the course of my career, I was able to be a great employee at Sumologic, Databricks and Segment, good outcomes there. Also as a consultant or working on this business, over 30% of our clients raised here one series is and if you look at the success rate of venture portfolios or how most startups succeed, it's a pretty high bar and clip in terms of conversion. Those companies raised in tier one firms. We've also worked with series B plus companies that have also raised seeing the alignment and how we choose companies that we partner with. We only work with one company in each respective industry. We're very selective like VCs. Also the way in which we can make a definitive impact being a partner to the founder and the founding team and helping them scale. As I saw that repeat pattern, I thought there's a couple things that make us one, me and our team unique as investors, but also inspired me to do this. Our main values we obsess over your business and why that actually matters is rather than giving general guidance, we really try to deeply understand the market and what's actually happening. The way in which we partner with companies, we learn what exceptional companies look like. But the other thing that's really unique is we see how and why people buy software. So as you start to see those patterns, not only are you seeing what makes this company great, but what also are the emerging trends. As we start to kind of like look at one, our success rate of making great company successful and being able to translate that on how do we go find the next amazing companies that are inspired by these markets. That's really what's inspired me to continue to push in this direction. We've made some great investments and companies like physical announcing their series A tomorrow. These like judgment labs backed by tier one venture firm and others who are proud to have partnered with amazing companies and excited to watch this firm and see all these companies grow. This is not a DGU, but I'm curious because there are a lot of emerging managers with a go to market background that end up aggregating some capital together, start cutting checks and give a similar spill to what you just saw. There is a lot of hands on support, there is very dedicated. Why does the market need another one of those? What do you think is happening from your standpoint? It's enabling these crop and new managers to emerge and do you think they will survive or is it survival of the fittest or is it a collaborative landscape where everybody gets to play in their own lane and share deals. Great question. There's two things. I think just in general venture is not a zero-sum game, but it is a survival of the fittest game. A lot of people who do this emerging manager, I was a consultant, translation layer, is like you can't conflate good consulting with investing. Although I just said a lot of people converted, that also just gives me exposure and an understanding on what it takes to even get to the next phase. It's having exposure to that stage. We also participate in many board meetings with our clients, so we actually see things at the board level and what great companies and dynamics actually look like. Partially, let the name come up. My repeat access to working with amazing founding teams and working closely with those groups at a very early level, having seen what excellent looks like. The other thing that I obsess over that's a little bit different. I don't really care about the trends and the waves and relationships with the top-tier firms and chasing those deals. Even if you look at my portfolio right now, there's consensus at some point when a top-tier investor comes in, but we're kind of working with these companies before people are excited about them. Mainly because I prioritize technologists, that's my number one thing. What I mean by that is I wrote an angel check into Clay. You say, "Well, that's a sales tool." If you look at Koreans background, he's a software engineer by trade. He's excellent. He's world-class, what he does. Engineers and technical folks can build something, change the product direction quickly and use go-to-market insights to get there. When I think about the excellent CEO that needs to come from all the things that need to be true in order to build a world-class company, I think I've earned and built that lens by all the work I've done on the consulting side, on the venture side, and having worked as an operator, seeing this at scale. We take no credit for the work that our founders have succeeded on. I think that we can help in terms of informing direction. I think a lot of people try to do this as a hobby or as a sport. I actually just want to create world-class returns. I think working my ass off over the last 10 plus years with a lot of amazing companies is the way that I've created this lens. To be an investor, not to say I'm a fancy consultant that now wants to be able to write checks into businesses because I deserve it. What's the biggest difference between helping a company from the inside, being that consultant, hands-on, spending several hours a week working in the trenches with the team on very tactical problems and switching it from cap-table side where you're an investor, you have a portfolio, you're probably not going to be able to dedicate to five to ten hours a week to every single founder. Yeah, I think there's two things. One, when you first make the investment, you're spending a lot more time with the founder. So I'd say, give or take five, ten hours a week. So I think the other thing is, from a consulting angle, when you're just supporting a company and you're on the inside, again, you're trying to figure out what are the effective ways you can drive and kind of tailor the organization to get to where they need to be. From an investent standpoint, you should have already built a relationship with the founder, deeply understood the company and the business, to know this is the bet you've made. Even when you think about the objective feedback you're trying to give somebody as an investor, you're trying to use all the things that you've learned, the network that you've built, and then understand what makes this founder unique. And so why I'm giving that breakdown, I think if you really distill that down on how you actually drive actually helping an investment. This is your 10 year bet. A consulting engagement, although we work with clients for almost a year plus, we build a relationship and obsess over their business. It's a one more transactional. You try to figure out the milestones and outcomes and approaches. Where if you're working with somebody who's put everything on red, and it's gonna be about 10 years till there's an exit, you have to kind of be more of a co-conspirator and coach. And if a founder needs help, they can give you a call at any time, and you're kind of like looking at it from a different objective lens. That's important as you see a company grow. The lot of investors try to help too much too early. And like this is the founder's journey and that they're trying to build a company. So I think being supportive is very different than that regard too. - From your experience, you work with so many teams like going from like zero to 100 mil in ARR, and then kind of like bring them to those tier on platforms where they can scale their fundraising journey. And a lot of those tier on platforms claim to have in-house go-to-market experts from the early stages. How does your offering win against those oppositions? - I'm always surprised how often we work with companies that have access to operating teams and their portfolios. I think there's a couple things. We work with so many different companies and have an access to not one portfolio, but many different types of portfolios, and like investors and teams. We remain fresh by understanding those things. And we can also use the best practices that we're learning from the amazing team at Clay. When you go into the board meeting and you're trying to figure out how to position the next skill for the fund raise. What did this other company do? Can I introduce the founder? We have this amazing network, the founders that also are at similar stages, right? So if you look at what an operating team or an investor might do, they have a network where a founder who's a seed stage founder is like, "Hey, I have this challenge that I'm really trying to overcome as I'm scaling my go-to-market team." And they introduce a CEO who's at Series B, and that Series B CEO may not have been in the seat of what the seed founder's done for like four years. So we try to be a little bit more relatable, and I think that access really helps. But the answer to your question more directly around what makes us unique. I do think obsessing over your business and really figuring out the right body of work is different than general frameworks that are trying to help achieve markup at each stage of the firm. Every firm has a different position. They're looking at their cap table, they look at their portfolio, how do we grow each company and help them achieve certain milestones. And I think the thing we really try to look at is, yes, we want you to achieve that, but at the way in which you will build a sustainable business, rather than how do we force the outcome for a quarterly goal to make sure the next board meeting goes great. So to make that a little bit more concrete, you'll hear everybody say, you need to get to a million and revenue as quickly as possible. That happens all the time. Now like, well, cursor got to be 200 million in 18 months. What are we doing for our AI company if we haven't even got to a million revenue yet? What's actually more objective than that scenario is, okay, if we need to get to the first milestone, do we even have the right product? What we really try to figure out is based on your discovery in the pipeline, sales, acumen aside, do people actually want what you are looking for and why is this product differentiated? And I think those types of things help companies respect us in all of our businesses' referral base through founders and 70% founders by 30% board members at this point. But the other thing is, even when I get introduced, typically it's like the founder doesn't know how to do enterprise sales. And then we realize the actual issue is the pricing model. First, people love this product. But I think just that type of lens is earned because of all the work that I've done at the board level and founder level with many different companies. It requires a little bit more of an authoritative stance that if you are at a venture firm and you're reporting to stack of people, that's very different than being an independent person, like running this as I am. And some days that's the most rewarding thing and some days it's terrifying. As every founder can attest to, they think that's what makes us truly unique. How do you not get that? Fine line between advising versus stepping into a more operator can of role and getting a little bit too much in the weeds. Yeah, and balancing that across an entire portfolio that requires just as much attention. How do you know when to pull in and step out? How do you manage that with the human to human relationship that you have with a founder that may have gotten used to having you on call five hours a day for a couple of weeks? And why are we doing our joint calls? I think the other thing that most operating teams try to do is they throw everybody in. They're like, all right, you're gonna have full access to Jimmy and Jimmy's been doing sales for 25 years. He's excellent, he's gonna help you do discovery calls and you teach the problem with that is like the founder's not actually learning how to build the company. So you think about the old traditional point of view and I think the point of view for a lot of investors still, the season and very good ones is like, you actually shouldn't be that hands on. His founder should be able to figure out. But I think the market is different now that most companies pick any vertical or industry. There's 10 or 15 versions of them at the sea. So the advantage that you're trying to create is we have an operating team that can help you outpace the competitive companies, right? I think the big thing that I've learned is when I was doing the work, the founders never actually learned it. We got them to a million way faster. They raised tier one series A's, board meetings are exciting. But then all of a sudden it's like, calibrating the right hires or figuring out what the key learnings are or translating those learnings to other people is very, very difficult to do. You achieve this milestone way faster but the company didn't succeed or it's really struggling. The reason why I frame that is like we do hands on work. We're always showing you best practices and we have very concrete examples when ever sharing playbooks or frameworks. If the founder learns it, they can do two key things. One, they can execute on that on their own. Two, they can figure out the right person full time to actually own this longer term. That's far more valuable because what you're trying to do is a couple things. And we all know this. We want the company to grow way faster. They need A players at all times. And the only way that you get A players is that there's a good foundational understanding of what needs to be true for that person to come in and succeed. And so that's really the role of the founder. And so we don't actually come in hands on and join sales calls. We don't come in and actually negotiate the contracts. We have a large enough sample size of deeply rooted experience between me having done this many times or someone like Trey on my team. There's a data bricks from pre-million in revenue to 1.5 billion in revenue. Having done this is nice. I see built out different teams open up offices. There's just like a lot of things that we've learned. We have a good enough sample size in understanding how to coach somebody without saying you just need to go find a champion. That's not helpful guidance. What we really want to figure out is what are the things are going to make your team be excellent? I feel very strongly about these topics. It's way more important to help someone calibrate and figure out how to insert the best person. Somebody told us recently we're like hinge. The goal is like, we want to get fired out of the job and be able to bring in the right people. That's ultimately our goal. We want to get fired as quickly as possible from the body of work that you're trying to accomplish. So you can continue to scale the company. The way that we do that is we try to help you build a foundation to do that. Fun one, 10 mil, half a mil to a mil checks, 9 to 18 portfolio construction pre series A between pre seed and pre series A. It's a bit of both of the most common models in this kind of like fan size. So like what are you actually trying to accomplish? Like, you know, like there's like two two sort of camps, the highly concentrated one, which would be the nine and more shots on goal, which would be the 18 that you're going for. How'd you get to this construction and what was the thinking behind it? Yeah, I think there's a few things. One, my goal is to fully become a fund manager and be able to co lead and lead rounds. Getting that signal in the first fund is really the main thing I'm showing that I want to be serious about being an investor. And not a consultant who can write small quick checks in the businesses. I think that's one thing that helps me stand out on how serious I am about the endeavor. The second thing is in terms of conviction and the ways in which we learn about different markets, it shows that we're taking very serious conviction and really want to be intentional about the bets that we make. And then third, in terms of our experience, we will help guide and inform founders based on what we're seeing, not being super hands on, but making sure we can help calibrate the things that matter the most. And so over time, we really want to be a good partner to the founder in a meaningful way and be able to double down on those outcomes. The other thing that we want to be able to do is partner with funds and firms like yours where we make a higher conviction bet. And then the follow on is kind of more of a partner lead round. And I think that's a really smart and savvy way to continue to build a portfolio and shows increased value for founders. And I think that where do you think that this goes? Is it going to be more small dynamic funds like, you know, 10 million size or are you going to go up and not just start building your own follow on capital reserves that was the plan? I'd like to continue to grow the size of the fund, but I don't aspire to be as focused on the assets under management and we're be really excited about the returns. And so more what I mean by that is keep the firm and fun size a little bit smaller focus on the returns and be thoughtful about the investments we make if we ever need to get access to more. capital or raise more funds were totally able to do that. I'm really motivated and inspired by looking at how we become a world-class firm and generate returns for our investors, and then continuing to increase funds size and just show that we're doing multi-stage work. Do your LPs understand the difference that you're trying to navigate? What's a common misconception that you hear often that you always need to clear up about the particular strategy, size, and space that you play in? I think my LPs to date understand this, so they think that's good. It means we're aligned. But I think the bigger questions are typically like why so concentrated or how do you not just use your consulting leads to get there of the investments that we've made only one of our consulting clients we've invested in. We've worked with probably over 60 different companies. So in terms of being really objective there, and then the other main question is reserves, how do you think about the reserves from what I keep hearing from more modern fund funds and LPs and investors? They're really excited about being the continuation partner in that area, and so I really want to just focus on strong conviction. If I'm very good at what I do and founders really like working with me, I will always be able to find a way to get on the cap table next round. It's way more important to get in early and get that high conviction bet, and spend a lot of time with the founders to have that relationship and our legacy at the table. To that point, to the opportunities come through the agency, they flow from the fund to the agency, where do they come from? Honestly, it's through a lot of the founder relationships. It's through a lot of the things that we're learning in the consultancy business just to get around market trends and seeing what types of companies should we be meeting with. And then I think the other thing is just boots on the ground. Being at events, being around different people, going to the nerdy drink ups where it's all software engineers and it's like me. I think you just learn a lot and find a lot of interesting referrals and introductions that way, but I do think a lot of it is just doing the like work and getting the right introductions and being in the right rooms. We spend a lot of time trying to earn a seat at the table that way. It's worked out so far. How do you deal? I mean, you sort of touched on it a little bit about what are the things that you were looking into a founder before you cut a check. How do you make sure that intuition that you have about how they take advice and kind of scale actually ends up being what it is they're using it is. The things that I really try to avoid or not give too much attention to is if lots of firms and funds are swarming it, like yes, that's interesting, but like we actually kind of like gives us a little bit of pause because there might be actually FOMO that one amazing firm and group of founders have already been selected. We don't know about them. That's one of my questions that I always ask. The other thing around diligence is deep technical acumen. I care less about where this person has worked and really like are they the best in their field as they're trying to release something. Maybe they've built out some open source package at their former employer. Maybe they were in some research lab. Maybe they've been obsessed with this topic for the last 10 years and they're the best of what they do. One, that's one of the things I really try to dig into deeply. They actually understand that. Second is throwing in different scenarios like if you had to fully change the idea what your aptitude and ability to actually do that and what your technical prowess have allowed you to make that shift. And most of the time, the best technologists actually will highlight their weaknesses and areas and like these are the things they need to go learn. One guy won't say his name right now, but he's like I just realized wasn't very good in this area and I read a full textbook over the weekend to figure out here are the areas that I need to get better at. I think that's really important because everyone talks about resilience, but there's also this whole thing around resilience. If this idea sucks and you have $3 million in the bank, what do you do? That requires a very, very different type of person that can then, hey, you know what? I'm going to, you know, clean dust myself off and go figure out what the next area or domain I go to attack with. And so like to me, someone with a high conviction in the elite themselves in technical acumen can always figure out what is going to be the thing. If they also have the aptitude and willingness to go to business, do sales and go to market. And I don't mean them being a raw raw VP of sales, CRO, but they have the confidence to go show up to events, go talk to customers, go figure out what's actually happening. Those are a lot of the things that I really look for. Everyone says great resilience, but I think it's really digging into the deeper questions. When this person is at their absolute lowest, what are they actually going to do about it and how do they dig themselves out? I don't wish that on anybody, but a reality is the startups are that hard. And we've seen this even on the consultant side in certain scenarios. Like some people are just ready to give up. And we really just want the best technologists who believe in themselves and are going to do anything that they can to be successful and have the willingness and acumen to be a CEO, not a proud engineer, although we want that. You have to be a CEO into very different breeders. What do you promise these founders and what do you make sure it's clear that you're not going to do for them? Capital and I'm available at any time. I think those are the two main things. Obviously, I want to be able to give good advice and I think all of the founders that I invested and would agree. The main thing I really do mean this as an investor is to generate a return. But if a founder calls me and they need advice, they should be able to reach me at any time and I should be able to give a good answer or put them in touch with the right person. If I can give you the capital and I'm true to my word and I can help you in the areas that you need based on what we're talking about today, then that should be enough. If a founder's picking me because I have to give you a bunch of legwork to save them or build the business, I think the issue with a lot of these GTM operator firms is the founders. I think I'd never have to think about this. Best just want to be elite, be coach and then they want you to get out of their way. I think that's the biggest difference, even if I look at how I've worked with the companies I've invested in. It's like, call me at any time. We'll talk on Saturday, two-hour conversation and they're like, "Hey, update for you a month later." Those are the types of things that I think are really helpful and I try to be useful in any tactic way that I can. Sort of feels at odds in the consulting piece, because you run a success without consulting business. These people don't want you to get out of the way. These people want you in their way, that they pay you to be in their way. Is there anything that you had to consciously unlearn or decouple from your 9 to 5 relative to the fund? Not that the fund is a part-time endeavor for you, but how do you balance these two sides of the brain? The one where the agency piece where you have to be in their business, you have to get your hands dirty, you have to perform because you're paid to do so. On the other hand, the GP kind of set up a brain where it's like, get to find somebody that can do it on their own. They're just going to need a couple pointers and they're going to figure it out. Van Diagram seems complex to manage. One, I do have advisors that are helping founders where there are very specific questions. Two people, Trey Johnson, who is part of Dynamic Growth Partners and Conor Drag-Montovitch, who's on the Go-to-Market team at OpenAI. Their expertise can be very helpful from very specific tactics where founders need it. On the separation from 9 to 5, when you are hired or paid to do something from a consulting standpoint, there's a very specific body of work and you're trying to help the founder accomplish naturally important and we can be very helpful and try to allocate some time resources. The question, there's always how can I help? From an investment lens, what makes this company unique and where are the areas that they're going to have gotchas that we can help them prevent and avoid over time? Most of the things you already have knowledge and conviction on, it's way less about how can I help? There's honestly the bigger thing I'm trying to decouple. An investor will always say, "Oh man, I can help. They can just do this thing. They'll be set." Then it's like, "Well, no, because now there's a whole other set of problems." You might have got them to 2 million in sales, but now you're going to hire a sales team and we haven't been able to remove the founder from any of the deals. Now what do we do? We're going to add 5AEs that now have access to the founder plus the VP of sales. That's a bigger challenge. I think if I am incredibly reductive on it, even though I've been full of long-winded answers today, it's not how can I help on an investor side. It's what makes this company elite and unique. If I need to help, can I actually be useful and do I understand enough about this company? That's really the big difference. Hopefully the learnings and the ways in which we are value-added for a consulting can be useful to founders. If I think about the longer-term vision of what we're actually trying to accomplish, we are starting to work with Series C+ companies on training, complementing executives and scaling different companies because we have contacts on the business. I do think that's a longer-term, more additive, and where we could still allocate the consulting to a founding team because companies bring in outside resources at a certain point. But I think the big thing is, if that core elite team can't figure out what makes them elite and great, it's going to be very hard to translate that. If we get to an elite point and that core can actually inform a consulting group like ours or other external teams, then they probably have a much bigger shot of winning the founders, actually deeply understand their own businesses and how they scale it. We had a mildly spicy take a minute ago that I want to go back to. What is one thing that early stage VCs within the go-to-market field of expertise think is important that you absolutely do not care about? You have to get to a million in 18 months. Sometimes it'll go way faster, sometimes it'll go way slower. It just depends on the product and the market. If there are three other competitors that have gotten a 5 million plus in six months in your companies behind, that might just be like the investment in the company. You can do two things. You can make sure you encourage the founders and figure out how they can go to this on your own and maybe you allocate your operating team to go help them. But I personally think what a firm should be doing in that scenario is not that you want to let your portfolio company fail, but you should actually be allocating that operations team to make sure your best bets do even better. I just think that milestone of you got to get there quickly, yes, that's important, but I think the core fundamentals of what gets you to be a great business is how good is your product. And then you can do everything from there, but if you get to revenue and nobody's using your product, it doesn't matter. A lot of teams get pressured to hit a revenue milestone and you look at the product metrics and nobody's using it. When you try to get to three or five or 10 or 15 or 50, you might be generating more revenue of how attractive is your business either to an exit or to the public market at some point, if you're just trying to brute force a first milestone and not actually having a good core business. Going back to the first angel check that you cut with your own capital and the last check that you've cut through the fund, what changed? That's a good question. One, I had a much closer relationship with the first check. This founder, I would, if I had more capital and I could lead the round, I would, and hopefully I can lead future rounds. I think he's just absolute world class, really, really believing him as a founder. The last check was very different because I didn't know the founder when I got introduced to him. It's like build the relationship, earn his trust, understand the business and the market. That was really forcing me to like, okay, if you're going to go make a better, better understand this business. I think the biggest difference is now the things that I know to be true in terms of how I'm sourcing and how I have conviction in different markets and businesses. That allowed me to be a lot more diligent on that investment, but seed and pre seed rounds move very quickly once people start investing. You got to make a quick decision on that. That's the bigger difference is now I'm starting to meet people, I don't know, going into it. That's like, do I trust this person and do I think they can actually build a good company? You were no stranger to wearing multiple hats, running a service business. It's very intensive on people, management, deliverables, you have your own accounting. I'm assuming that the transition into the role of the emerging GP was into tough, what were the hardships going from a full-time operator role into a full-time investor? What did you find? What did you not expect it was going to be that difficult that turned out to be like a real challenge? Yeah, I think it's two things. One fundraising is way harder than anybody wants to admit, even though you see all these great emerging funds and realize how amazing people are when they watch funds because it's to be really hard. The first thing, no question. Even fundraising is a founder. It's different. I think what's coupled with that, and I think probably more the meat of the question that you care about, is being able to explain and understand that you have to be really good at saying no, rather than saying yes to everything. As an operator, the more you say yes, you're probably rewarded and can earn more as an investor your job is actually like to say no most of the time. Which very hard to do, especially at the beginning, especially when you really believe that this company can be great, but if you can't get venture returns, you have to be a lot more discerning. I think that was a tougher transition for me to prove that I was able to do that, and now that I've been able to do that more, I feel a lot more comfortable with it. Everyone can claim that they're really good at it, but until like you have to make a real decision that the people who gave you money to invest, like you're telling them with earnest and in an honest way that you made the right bet, you have to be really thoughtful about who you said now to and what you've researched. I think that's a bigger difference for sure. How do you keep all your ducks in a row running a full time, successful, growth mark in agency, successful, emerging manager fund? You have your own life, is there any kind of AI agent in the background that grooms your inbox every morning? What are the different choices you have? For my entire career, I've just been so obsessive and really focused on showing up, doing the work, keeping track of things, over communicating. I think those are just more like the human traits. I know it's not an exciting or fun answer. I don't have this cool workflow that I can walk you through, but I just think that's what has made me unique. And then, yeah, just keeping track of things, and like notion and writing notes, and really just like obsessing over the work. And I know I drive my team crazy sometimes, but I think it creates a good professional and set to high bar. That's one thing that we didn't talk about that you've prepared a week before it is recording to share with the rest of the world. That you're going to walk away and be like, "Damn, I didn't ask you this question. Now nobody's going to hear it. It's not going to whist him." Oh, man. I think the big thing is I'm very serious about doing this as an investor. And I think that a lot of the consulting operating gets conflated. And I think the next world class set of investors will come from this domain as a world class operator and knowing how to decouple those two things. And so yeah, I'm really excited about the opportunity to raise and run this fund. And I have the opportunity to meet you guys. Thank you very much for having me on. I love this stuff. This is great. I think your passion comes through. I think you're the prototypical manager when it comes to this new generation of hybrid operator/early stage, pre-product market fit, and sometimes pre-product as well in your case. So thank you for sharing your perspective. It's just definitely very cool. And the passion shines. It's a flame to the most of the founders that want to be working with somebody that cares about their own products and companies as deeply as they do. In the variants of VCs, there is a very early manager like you. And then there is the old guard that are really passionate about it. And then there is a gigantic swath of not-so-passionate people in the middle that make up the majority of the sample size. So thank you so much for joining us this morning. You've just watched another episode of Slice, the podcast for emerging managers. Special thank you to Dakota for joining us for the conversation. And to Walter for introducing us to Dakota. If you're new around here, make sure to subscribe to our sub-stack and not to miss any future episodes. We'll see you next time. Bye.