E352: JD Vance’s Co-Founder on Space Defense, Hard Tech, and the Biggest Opportunities Ahead

So you started in India with JD Vance in 2019. What was it like working with a vice president in a business context? Before we started in India, we've been working together since 2014, really. And what always made JD a great investor was, I think he was a very first principles type investor in that he was excellent at thinking about what the state of the world was today and seeing around corners as to what it might look like five to seven years from now. And then taking that lens and thinking about how to build investment these sees around that. And so he also was very, I would say, very mission driven and enthusiastic about themes around what could venture dollars do to help our country, our government specifically, help our citizens, how could we improve the quality lives of most Americans with advances in science and technology. And how could we also serve founders in off-the-bean path geographies. And when you sort of put that all together, you sort of had this interesting investor who was both first principles driven, but also mission driven. And when you combine that, it gets very interesting. And we were able to look at all sorts of companies across a myriad of sectors, including biotech, defense, advanced manufacturing. And it was really all about this idea of returning venture dollars to backing founders, addressing what we see as the need to solve problems in our country. Almost like this idea of to be progressive in the asset class, to be regressive and return the asset class to sort of its inception. What adventure really start out to do? And it was to help our government. It was to help our companies create real GDP growth at scale. And it was to help our citizens. Many people believe that there's a trade-off between investing in really innovative companies and getting venture-like returns with limited risk. Do you believe that there are strategies where you could invest on a risk-adjusted basis in a superior way and make some real best? I do. I think one of the traps-- and you have to be really careful when you're thinking about some of these categories where, as an American, you really want these things to work. You really want us to control our own destiny in all the different themes and ensuring whether that's tied to pharmaceutical, whether it's tied to defense, whether it's tied to job creation. And so you want these things to work. And as an investor, you need to be very careful that the mission actually matches with the potential return for your cost to capital. And as a venture investor, the way we think about our cost to capital is we want investing companies that if they sail and things go well on the way and probably some serendipity as well, they can, on a net basis, return our fund and ideally even multiples of that. And so as we delve into some of these categories that are bits and atoms, businesses where there's real hardware, there's a lot of opportunity, but the business model innovation is the key. And so you need to find founders who not only sort of on this continuum, not only understand how to build tech and how to convert that into product, but then how to create a real business around it, where you can get venture style returns at scale. You can have real gross margins. And it's a subset of these businesses. And so whether you think about defense, whether you think about advance manufacturing, whether you think about pharmaceutical, whether you think about energy, it's like one of these areas where I'm very bullish on the categories and the cater of these industries. But there's very few companies that actually get the tech right and translate that into business model innovation. And so that's sort of where we focus our energy. There's a lot of nuance to this. Can you make a lot of money in innovation? There's a couple of ways I think about it. The only truly innovative mainstream firm that I think of is Vinod Kostlo. And one of the things that he says, he tells us to LP's openly and he's even written about it is that he wants to have really good returns. He wants to have top-board, top-board returns. But he's not optimizing on returns. He's optimizing on impact. So there he's making this inherent trade off. And it's interesting. And also, self-selects a certain type of LP. Thankfully, he's had great returns as well. But I think there's some rules to how to invest into very innovative companies. Unlike as a founder, so if you're Elon Musk and you say, I want to build a Dyson Swarm around the Sun. One of the advantages of doing it within the context of a company versus a fund is that now you could amalgamate talent. Now, the world's best thinkers and doers will come to you. With a VC, you don't have that leverage. You can't hire these 100x investment analysts. They'll just analyze everybody else. So you kind of fixed in your constraint from a team standpoint. But the main constraint that I see there is the answer to the question, can you invest in very innovative companies and make a lot of money? Yes, but it must be in something that's not too bleeding-edge. It needs to be frontier, but it can't be five to 10 years away, because then you won't have the following up. I think that's right. I think-- so we take a lot of pride in having been ahead of the curve on a lot of themes that are now-- in areas that I would call very busy. Defense is a good example. There are all these founders building defense companies right now. And there's a lot of very sector-focused VC funds. It's only defense. Or it's only advanced manufacturing. And our view on that, again, back to the high-cager in the category, but being very bearish on most of the opportunities that we see is that a lot of those companies needed to be built five years ago before the problem and surface of before our government really needed to change its procurement cycles and change how it thinks about working with tech companies to solve a lot of its issues and ability to scale. So you have this behavior where there's this sort of memetic behavior where people and firms tend to sort of all sort of flock to these same ideas after they become a little bit more mainstream because they were historically contraire. And so they think of them as contraire ideas, but they no longer are. And so we try to stay away from that. But I think your point is an interesting one. We also think there's a lot of groups that say, no, no, no. We're not memetic. We are thinking about the future. We are going to solve for the future. The way we see it is going to evolve. It's almost impossible. And so when you have investors and you don't have ever green fund, I think that's just a very hard investment to make. And the tech risk is, in our minds, is too high. We prefer going after these sort of hidden in plain sight problems. And so when everyone moves into defense, we move a little bit away from there. And we go back into health care, which has been bottomed out. And a lot of investors have real scar tissue from touching health care. But now with advances in AI, there's a lot of stuff one can do that you couldn't do five years ago. So we try to be very nimble and curious. And I think there's this barometer where you can't go too far into the future. But you need to be prescient enough to be ahead of these market trends. And I think there's a couple ways one can do that really effectively to your point of coastlets. You need to have aligned LPs that are really comfortable in your strategy. And part of our strategy is having a very, very concentrated portfolio. So 12 companies per fund. And then you sort of double and triple down into your best company. So it's really only like three to four big bets per fund. And so that gives us a lot of time to do research, to collaborate with folks in our network. And we have a lot of strategic LPs that have very experienced engineers and scientists on their payroll to help us with answering some of these hard questions. And so you sort of have this met and net mesh network of aligned folks that are optimistic about the future. But doing it in a way that is informed, researched, driven, and cynical enough that you're not going to chase stuff when everyone else is going into it. Expert calls have always been one of the most powerful ways to build conviction. But today, investors are asked to cover more companies, move faster, and do it with leaner teams. 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They need every portfolio company to work. Then they need every fund to work, and then they need the whole category to work, where some of the smartest LPs, they love these concentrated positions in specific funds, because they know they're building a basket of funds. They're not investing only in 12 companies, in the case of NARIA or 12-15. They're actually investing into the best ideas from each manager. Most of our LPs, the discussion has always been, OK, we're backing you for fund one, but we see this as a long-term bet. We understand you're trying to build a platform for the next, say, quarter century, if things continue to go well. And can't promise we'll be with you that whole time. Is that how they're underwriting it? And that they're betting on, call it, 40 companies, versus just on the fund? Is that how they're getting their mind around it? And that we expect one super power-like outcome in the supporting companies. It depends on the archetype of an investor. I think the larger institutions tend to think that way, but based on our performance, we have some pretty big winners in our first fund and expect to have in our second fund as well. And so hopefully that can be showcased every five years or so, but I think that's right, yes. Hopefully you don't have to wait three funds. No, exactly. And then there's the long tail of investors that founders we've worked with, and other more individual LPs, where it's a different calculus. Narya Yafan was famously backed by Peter Teal, Mark Andresan, Eric Schmidt of Google. Why would they back a VC fund? And maybe you could explain the rationale. With the Peter example, we had been working with him for a long time. So there was a good relationship there, both thought about a lot of things in similar ways and a good record of investing together. I think the broader network of the reason we were able to raise a first fund, which is always really hard, but also do it with high quality investors that actually could be really helpful to us, was that I think we were very clear about what we were trying to do. JD and I had been living in the Bay. And we understood the behavior, but we were surprised that so many funds were going all in on enterprise software and consumer internet. We understood the short-term financial rationale for it. But the way we looked at the opportunity, we had some cynicism about that. And we wanted going back to this idea of being mission driven and investing things that are real and actually can have real impact at scale. We just saw very few funds doing that. Of course, there were some exceptions. And combining that with this not requirement, but comfort that there were world-class founders, capable of building transformational businesses outside of the Bay, outside of California, outside of Boston, New York, all these hubs, because we had seen it and invested in it historically. Putting those two things together, combined with some strategic LP relationships that we had already surfaced to folks like Peter and Mark and Eric and some other well-known people, that really resonated with them. And we were very clear that we weren't going to be chasing trends. We weren't going to do crypto. We weren't going to do NFTs. We weren't going to do these things that we would almost always have foam all around, but we would never invest if we would everyone started chasing something new that came up. Generally, I right now is another example of that. A lot of our companies, I would consider AI companies, but they're not these sort of large language model platforms or things. And putting that all together, I think that really resonated with investors who have great pattern recognition. They said, OK, this is actually a unique approach. And we weren't shy about saying, look, we're not saying consumer tech is bad, and we might do a consumer tech business. And we have a great company and consumer in the religion space. But that's not the focus. It's being nimble and curious and taking a macro view to what problems are. You can't be all in defense. You can't be all in advance manufacturing, because it's only going to be one or two companies that are really special per cycle. And so if you miss Anderill or an equivalent, maybe defense is in the right place to play. Maybe you should be thinking about defense or terrestrial defense. Maybe it's space defense. And so we had a lot of really interesting ideas around that. And that was how these folks got in. And it also didn't compete with what they were doing. And typically these category definers, they Anderill, the SpaceXs, they're there before the category exists. They create the category. Otherwise, you can't be chasing momentum and capture these opportunities, at least not at their least. We get pitched a lot by founders who are trying to build the next Palantir, the next Anderill. And I think perhaps the next Anderill is Anderill, right? And that being said, there are-- there's always white space in these categories. But-- and so we just invested in a company a couple months ago that has a very different theory of the case of where there's opportunity within defense, which really resonated with us. And so the thesis was, you've got Anderill's and these big companies going after the big ticket government programs that are with very complex technology, very capital intensive business rate, and you raise billions and billions of dollars. And a lot of those companies already exist that are able to win those bits. That being said, all these arms of the US government have all these shorter term needs in what I would call almost micro projects. They're not interesting enough to be sexy for some all-star founder to go after. They're not big enough outcomes on their own where you're going to get $10 billion plus outcome. And so venture investors tend to shy away from them. But this founder, Julie Bush, is ex-Palantir. She said, well, if you do this as a whole co-model, again, back to turning tech to product to business model innovation. If you have business model innovation around this where you can sort of have this hub and spoke structure, where you're sharing resources across these product companies and going after these much sort of micro problems at scale, that gets really interesting. And so that was a very unique idea in what I would say as a crowded category. And so we're not sort of off investing in defense. It just got to be really special. Maybe let's double click on one of your companies, too, and Omelie. How did you go about picking that company and explain how that fits your thesis? So at prior funds, I had been a somewhat prolific investor in space and defense. One of the things we were observing was that this concept of what was sort of theater for defense was changing quite a bit. And we had all these capabilities at a terrestrial level. And we were starting to see more companies do stuff at a maritime level. But we sort of felt that space had evolved from this perspective area that was just going to do stuff that was very futuristic, like go to Mars, or mine aquifers on the moon or whatever we were talking about before. But then all of a sudden it got really boring with just this basic infrastructure. But we saw in between that what was really happening was that space was going to become this next contested domain for a fight for sort of what does it mean to be sovereign in space. Our most critical assets were all our communication systems and our military systems are now in orbit. How do we protect those assets? How do we understand if others are trying to impede our progress there? And through our network we had met Evan who was the founder of Trunomaly. And he just had this really interesting theory of how space was going to be the next contested domain. How China was already advancing much faster than we were in developing capabilities both for, I guess, offensive defense and offensive offense. And we just didn't have that. And they were space force, ex-military, ex-prime, sort of DNA, putting all these interesting founders together. And so they had sort of had this unfair advantage where they had built these-- essentially built the playbook for how this was going to work and how the government was going to actually be able to solve these issues. But the government and the primes were too slow to actually be able to build for this next modality of potential warfare and all these tech, both hardware and software enabled capabilities of what we need to have. And so they said, well, we need to do this as a private company and work very closely with the government. So they built it in the public sphere, and then they went out in the private sphere to go. And that sort of pattern recognition for us is really important. And if you've looked where they are now, we were in the pre-seed. They're very far along. And they just won scope in Golden Dome, both for hardware and software. There's no other startup that got that. And so this idea of SDA space domain awareness is evolving into also space-based interceptors and all these other capabilities that we hopefully will never need to use. But we need to have, at least from a deterrent standpoint. And I think space is sort of this next operating system for modern power. And we evident this team was there ahead of that. The way I like to explain it is it's another form of air rights. If you think about recently in the war with Iran, US and Israel now control the air rights. So they had domain over the country they could go and bomb whatever targets in Iran. Same thing. Now the new air rights space where you could basically take lasers and reflect them in space and then basically hit any target in the world. So obviously that's the next frontier. It's the next frontier. It's a very interesting-- I guess what was an academic discussion that's now going to become quite real about what-- we used to have this with our oceans and our skies as well. And how it's going up into an orbital level. What does it mean to be sovereign in space? How do we create systems around that that actually work with our allies? How do we-- who has rights to do what on the moon? How-- there's going to be all these really complicated decisions one's going to need to make. And being able to have capabilities to protect our assets as we sort of delve into these complicated questions and hopefully lowercase B battles, I think it's going to be really important. Perhaps this is a dumb question. I'm investor in SpaceX and Varda, but I've never really thought about what was the catalyst for space tech as a space? Was it just SpaceX, in psychologically, taking away the boundary of creating space companies? Or was there something technological? Space X is a big part of it. But there were lots of other companies that we backed historically as early as 2012 that were-- the tech allowed for costs to get down to sort of get a payload into space. And some of these ride-sharing models, obviously, SpaceX is a big player there, but there were other companies as well. The quality of imagery technology to allow you to do the Earth observation, and all of a sudden you should have this proliferation of these small-sat constellations that we're able to do well. And you sort of slowly got more and more infrastructure into space, and then you could start evolving from, OK, well, we can get rockets into space, satellites, work. And now it's like, OK, well, what are some other things? What are some other things we can do? And obviously, with the rise of the internet and our need for better communications and all the advances that are going on, that telecom space, it's required us to go up to be able to sort of cloak the planet and better comms. If you've been considering future straightings, now might be the time to take a closer look. The future's markets have seen increased activity recently and plus 500 futures offers a straightforward entry point. The platform provides access to major instruments, including the S&P 500, NASDAQ, Bitcoin, natural gas, and other key markets across equity indices, energy, metals, forex, and crypto. Their interface is designed for accessibility. 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The re-entries, issues are being solved and so they can go test science, they can test power, they can test all these things in space. And then you get all these side businesses where now you have the stuff in space, and you have to re-bacalyge in it and so you need technology for that. And now that satellites are in orbit much longer, you need to think about repositioning them and so you have space tugs and that's a new subcategory. And then you need to think about refueling and so you have all these sort of businesses that layer on top of each other. But I think a lot of those businesses in themselves are like someone incremental, somewhat, if they aren't already, will be somewhat commoditized. And so like versus like what a true anomaly is doing because what they're doing, you're going to have these autonomous vehicles in orbit that need advanced compute to handle all sorts of complex repositioning, maneuverability and awareness. And there's only a very short list of companies that are really special doing that. That's why we are sort of bearish as investors on space techs, on space tech, except for a couple companies, but very bullish on the space economy. I just finished the book of Elon recently came out and the author wants to create a million new Elon's and wants to inspire the next generation. You're in a very unique vantage point that you're investing in very frontier and deep tech at an early stage. You're seeing these founders before their household net. What are the common traits behind these deep tech founders that truly want to change the world and want to risk their entire career? The really good ones are, look, they're all mission driven. They see a problem and all they care about is fixing. To be mission driven, you don't have to be necessarily an expert in the category. You've been building in the sector for 10 years. Some of our best founders actually see something from the outside and they come in. There's lots of different archetypes of founders that can work in that regard. This is their life's work and the passion is there. That's the first thing. I think if the question's really about how do you get more of them, I think you need to encourage people to have independent thought. For a subset of them, they just know this is a problem and they want to go address it and they're able to sort of self-start and kind of keep reinforcing that with their learning and building the tool sets they need to go do this. They just somehow know how to do it and it's like they're training themselves and they're using the best technology and the best networks to go figure that out. They just won't say no. That's like the biggest thing. Do most of them have some kind of financial success? Maybe we talked about aquahires or a couple million bucks before they go on these grand visions or are they just staking everything including their livelihood on them? It's a good question. Our founders, many of our founders are a little bit older because we tend to like folks that well we think it's really important to have some sort of industrial acumen when you're going after these historically intractable problems because understanding how to build a tooling and die company is not something that your average graduate of Stanford or Berkeley is going to know how to do it. Probably I don't care about it if you're in the bay. It's someone who's sort of maybe seen that living to Troy whether they did it or their families did it. It's sort of that sort of insider knowledge that I think is important and oftentimes that is from being in the industry. These founders aren't 16 or 22 or 25. They're maybe in the early 30s. So that's I think a piece of it. Some of them have, it's a whole mix. Do they have capital? We have some repeat founders but many of them, no, they're bootstrapped. They're living in geographies where it's a little bit easier to live to. They're not living in New York or San Francisco where it's really expensive. I was just listening to an interview by an early Tesla engineer and he was begging Elon to raise more cash to have on the balance sheet. Elon was essentially starving the balance sheet to create the sense of urgency in the company. Tell me about that. Well, I mean, so I've been doing this about 15 years now. I'm trying to, I'm not even sure I can give you an example of where a company is just sad on a ton of cash. You know, you say, oh, I ask a founder, why are you raising more capital? It's a war chest. We have these skunk word projects and in case one of them really materializes. It always sounds like a good idea but the reality is when you have the capital, it's just too hard not to use it. So it's sitting there and so you've got to do something with it. You either hire more people. You chase more shiny objects. You're like, okay, we're really focused on this product but this is like a Jason's but not too adjacent. We should build that too. And you sort of get all this distraction. Is this coming from the board? Is this from the founder who creates this pressure when you have capital to become scatterbrains better? Hopefully my, my boards and my companies don't have too much capital but I think it actually is, I mean, a lot of it's from the bottom up of sort of employees saying, hey, well, we should try this. It becomes harder to say no. What do you mean no? We have a hundred million dollars. I mean, there's not one good answer for it. I think it's sometimes even the best founders. I think they often sort of overestimate their ability to do multiple, you know, multiple things at once. If they like, we always talk about, you know, find a small market you can win and dominate, you know, create a healthy monopoly, durable franchise there. And then, and then you can expand out. And there's a, there's a sequencing where yes, you want to start ideating on some of this stuff before, before you're too far in this sort of this high class problem like monopoly land. But, but you need to do that leanly because once you start also the other problem is like, it's not, you don't think about, you know, some costs or whatnot. It's like, once you start putting capital into it, it's like, oh, well, we're already into this for 10 million, we got to keep going. And it just becomes this sort of, it's hard to rip the core. Yeah, there's like negative flywheel that just spins faster and faster. And then it's like, we just, all of a sudden we wasted all this time or this. And I, and then you, and then you sort of just, you just get all this feature creep, you get all this, you confuse the team as to, okay, well, we, I thought we were doing that, but now we're doing this is weird. It's like, do we pivot? Do we not? And so lean lean is really good. And how do you know when, when to go into your second problem? It's really hard question to answer because it's so bespoke for each, not only for each company, but each, you know, each, what is the senior leadership dynamic at that company? What category are they in? What's going on at a macro level at that moment in time? What's going on? What do we think's going to happen three years from now? Once we actually, this product is going to be live. Whether I'm on the board or having these conversations, sort of, just directly with founders, I always say, if you don't ever build this product and you're really successful at what your core business is, are you? Are you satisfied with the impact you will have on whatever you're trying to do? And the answer always, for our companies, it's always always yes. And so I sort of, the way I try to firm with them, it's like, you haven't completed that mission yet. So, only start on this when you know that by the time, based on your modeling and your sense of the future, the product too will be in market sort of around when you've more less completed this mission. And completing the mission doesn't mean you're done with that. It just means, I guess what I think is market saturation. That's really, really, really hard to do. And so, if you're on this, is this massive uphill battle? Then all of a sudden, you're kind of going downhill a little bit towards being a category to defining company. It's like, yeah, we should all be high-fiving that you're there, but you're not done yet. And so, just be very cautious before you get distracted. And so, it's really hard, but the product-- >> There are words out there. >> It's not a word. You change the outcome of your company by order of magnitude. You turn a $10 billion company to $100 billion company, or go up from there. And so, I like it, but I just need to be done in a measured way with the right amount of resources. So, go back to like this idea. And if you don't want to be starved for capital, and you don't want to be starved for, lean team is good, but you can, you can-- have a few people working on this stuff. There's a golden ratio where you want to make sure that you're not worried about whether you're taking an Uber from the airport or the bus, but also you don't want to have so much cash that you're not worried, you don't even think about it or you're not focused, you're not hyper focused on a mission. I would argue you need to buy in from leadership, but you don't want to have, if it's product two, you want designated people focusing on product two. Whether they're existing employees or you hire new people, it depends on the specifics of what you're doing. But when you start having like really good people focus on product one and product two at the same time, that's where it goes sideways. So sometimes instead of fighting these impulses, if we could find ways to align with these human needs, I think certainly you have more firepower to go longer and deeper and continue compounding your advantages. I think it's one of the things we take pride in doing is we try to really help with what I call like found to blind spots. And I think that condition you're talking about is very real. We all have experienced and will continue to and really feel it. And so it's like how do you how do you stay the course, but also scratch that edge to continue to be innovative? And maybe it's innovation around how you iterate on your core business. Maybe it's lowercase I innovation around like some limited testing to see if there's real traction with it. It doesn't 18 that you oversee and there's lots of different ways to do it. But I think there's always like a slightly contradictory element to anything when one thinks about adventure because it's also unique and bespoke and the world changing every day. And so it's really really hard to get it right is the other danger is you sort of just you you stay in your lane for too long and you're not innovative enough because you get you get complacent and then like competition comes or you know and so a lot of people try to solve that to your point through M&A. You know I think buying versus building is usually not the right answer. And if you have to buy if you feel like you really have to buy maybe that means you're in the wrong business anyway because hopefully you can build something that that is more innovative and you said to be more creative and get the right team and maybe it's maybe it's a new hiring initiative. And so I so I see that a lot when I don't like M&A sprees for sure. My best founders look at it and they say that they say look we went and looked here's the six reasons why this would make sense but the the tech isn't good enough. The culture is going to get messed up. Those are the two biggest things I think from an M&A standpoint why you don't do it and it's also going to be distracting. And so I like your framing of it. There's already micro changes one can make and you know doing it at the junior employee level doing it at the board level. They're doing it at the industry level. There's lots of other ways. You can it's like how do you become a thought leader now that you're moving out of the really far along. Do you have to do M&A just help help educate the industry help educate the government on why you're doing this important. Turn them into a customer. They're open for business right now. Maybe they weren't a customer for people are trying to be creative and you know not just at a federal level and a bunch of states too like so all this stuff you can do that is net accretive to your core business as we try to help. There's a lot of polarization in this country happening. A lot of it is driven by social media and incentives behind social media. What changes whether structural, philosophical, regulatory could be changed in order to depolarize the country. I think it's ultimately sort of a business model question. If you're incentivizing with clicks and sort of these feedback loops for information that people require and allowing folks to best monetize off of that you're going to have this cycles where people are just getting fed the information they want to see and get this confirmation bias. And then that sort of at scale turns into you get these different camps. So if your confirmation bias is this you'll go to this site and if it's the opposite you go somewhere else. And so I think you just need to the systems and the infrastructure around that need to change. I'm not sure I have a great answer. We've seen a bunch of companies that claim to have an approach to it. And so it's not for me it's not like an investable thesis or it's not a thesis that I'm actively pursuing. But what's really important to me both for me Colin as well as also what I think is a good business is that I'm you know anything that we think is going to further polarize the country is not entering to us. So there's this concept of the parallel economy. I don't really like it. I don't believe in it. I don't think it makes a good business because I think people can overestimate the importance of ideology in a business context. The best founders who I know are not political at all. They are, I mean they might be political in the sense that they're pro business or something like that and they're pro capitalism and so they have maybe some libertarian tendencies or whatnot. But what they really care about is they don't care if you're red, if you're blue, if you're purple, if you're nothing, they are just busy building amazing products and hiring the best people they can to build that product to come up with business motivation around that product to create something that is useful for everyone. And that's I think if everyone just focuses on that and you sort of kind of keep the ideology out. Like I just, that's where the good businesses are being built. I think I think mistakes have been made historically where you try to be. You're too aligned to whether it's a party or a specific issue. And I think if you just really think about first principles and solving, using tech and science to solve something that is real and that's going to, that's what's going to help sort of get us away from this because you're going to, you're going to solve an energy problem that, you know, brings down the cost of living for lots of Americans. You're going to cure a disease that lets us live longer. You're going to change this education system so our children can figure out how to engage with AI socially in a healthy way and all these apps, but also like figure out what the livelihood track is for them going forward instead of sort of this doom scrolling stuff. And I don't believe that like we should overregulate it or anything. That's just, that's like my lane and where I, where I can help. The best take I've heard on this and the most optimistic take is that there's somewhere really only one to three percent of the population is radicalized. So what you see online is actually a very, very, very small minority of people. And if you just do, to do a thought experiment, if you were just to walk up to somebody on the street, the odds of them being radicalized either on the right or on the left is very low. The perception is that basically everybody's either for you or against you because of the feeds and everything. So I don't have a solution for that either, but it's good to remember that social media is not reality. And it doesn't just mean people jumping on private jets, that's not what they're doing. It also means politically and from a polarization, social media just incentivizes the loudest, the most extreme views, but this is not actually a representative of reality. Even as an investor, like I always say, like be, be very cautious of, you know, of loud founders, like signal noise is not measured by how loud you are. And that's usually like a bad thing. And also if like a founder spending a lot of time on X or any other platform, they're not building and maybe that's not a good use of time. There's times to say things and there's time not to say things, whether they're political or otherwise, but the best founders tend to be less active there. Think about what our government's trying to do right now with advances in technology, sort of on the energy side, on space policy side, on all the on-shoring around pharma advanced manufacturing. If you're a startup founder building in those categories, this is just like a, we're in the super cycle that's like net accretive to what you're doing. And maybe you disagree on other issues that are some of the hot-pun issues, but you can get business done. You can collaborate in ways that are really productive, not just for you, your company and downshines all your employees and their families and your livelihood. That's interesting. And then that starts creating GDP growth. You can scale a company. But I also think what happens is then you realize that we're getting stuff done together. And we're, even if we're very different on these one or two issues. And then all of a sudden, you get back to this world where you can be a lot, it's okay to be aligned not in every single way and disagree on things. And so that's sort of what I kind of try to do. I like to do that in business when I'm negotiating with somebody. I'll point out, here's the 10% where it's zero-sum. Yep, let's talk about that. Let's call it out. Exactly. Here's the 90% where we're not. Let's focus on the 90%. And then we could butt heads after we're happier. Or maybe I guess, in a country that you could start with the 10%. But you don't have to be 100% aligned with everybody to find that area for alignment. If you could go back to the beginning of your career, you've lived this kind of remarkable career, both as investor, but also some of the most prolific founders and investors of our time. What is one piece of advice you'd give a younger column that would be there, accelerated your career, helped you avoid custom mistakes? And Peter talked about this with his career. I think going back, I spent too much time sort of chasing status in my mind, appear to be very prestigious or important. But it was really kind of stuff that in retrospect looked impressive on the marquee, but it wasn't what I was passionate about. It wasn't what I really cared about. And so I guess if I were to go back, I would say focus more on the long-term trajectory of what are the right, what networks can you build, what people can you have around you who inspire you, focus on sort of going lockstep based on what everyone else is doing, but also like, all easier to say now and looking back. But this stuff takes time and let it marinate, let it compound. You don't need to have the answers all at once. And I think if I had had, I'm not sure what have taken it at that age, but like if I had that advice, maybe I mean, I absolutely love what I do. And I think I would have gotten here much faster. But I just been a little more introspective on what was really important to me and sort of staying away from maybe what society was saying should be important. I think about reputation as this compounding asset, it takes so many years to compound reputation. I've seen it in every walk of life. And then once it's actually compounded, it's so valuable. 100%. that's I mean what we're doing. What we do is all about reputation. It's, you know, do founders want to work with us? Do they want to share their visions of the future with us? And reputation is not just reputation of being helpful to them and having successful outcomes with them. It's being open. It's being communicative. It's being human with them and sort of having that level of compassion and genuine interest. Even if it's not a fit, that all of that ties into reputation in a way that I think allows you to sort of endure much as for one cycle, but for a much longer period of time. Well Colin, going back to 2015, when I made my very first venture investment with Eric Henderson in my mentor, he came to me and he said, "You want to become a venture capitalist on my guess?" He's like, "Let's put together an SPV to invest in to Compass Therapeutics." And I asked him, "What's an SPV?" And he explained it to me. And we reached out to Alopeza. You were one of those people that said, "Yes, thankfully the company went public." But thanks so much for supporting me throughout my career and congratulations on everything. You know, it's great to circle back with, I can't believe all that time's elapsed. I love you. You're doing a wonderful job and it's, as Eric and it's, it's fun to see our friends thriving. Thank you. If you found this conversation valuable, please click Follow How I Invest so that you don't miss the next episode with the world's top investors.